paul flannery

Anybody else want to question Rajon Rondo?

NEW YORK — All around the cramped and joyless interview room in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, reporters raised their eyebrows and began working their fingers and thumbs on their mobile devices. Really? Mike D’Antoni went there?

"I’d like to see him play in Minnesota and see how he does," D'Antoni said. The him in question was Rajon Rondo, and to be fair D’Antoni added that he thought Rondo was a good player. "Really, really good,” in fact. Too late.

There was tremendous irony in D’Antoni’s sarcastic aside. Rondo was the player the Timberwolves wanted along with Al Jefferson in the Kevin Garnett trade. Their insistence on including him in the deal held up the transaction for a time, but Celtics president Danny Ainge held firm, and the C's wound up dealing Sebastian Telfair instead.

Additionally, Rondo was acquired as Phoenix’ first-round draft choice when D’Antoni was the coach there and the Suns were in the business of selling off first-round picks like a day trader selling junk stocks for quick cash. One more bit of history: The team that had the selection immediately ahead of Phoenix? The Knicks, who chose the immortal Renaldo Balkman.

In reality, D’Antoni didn’t say anything that a lot of people haven’t thought at one time or another, and it really boils down to an even simpler question: Just how good is Rajon Rondo really?

The Celtics are done answering those questions. They have lived with him for the last five seasons and they know just how important he is to their overall success even if his funky floor game doesn’t always translate into huge stat lines.

"I’m not answering that," Paul Pierce said dismissively. "Next question." To which Rondo added simply, "Everyone has their own opinion."

The whole notion of disrespect has long been part of professional basketball. In this very arena, in another time, then-New York coach Jeff Van Gundy called Michael Jordan a "con man" for the way he would butter up opponents before tearing their hearts out.

Rondo has a bit of that cold-eyed killer in him, but he’s never expressed any interest in cozying up to his peers. That game doesn’t seem to interest him very much, and as to whether that sort of talk bothers him at all, even his own coach wasn’t sure. Or at least he wasn’t saying.

"I don’t talk about it a whole bunch. He doesn’t bring it up a lot," Doc Rivers said before the Celtics went out and finished off their sweep of the Knicks with a 101-89 victory (click here for a recap). "It probably does in some way, it would bother anyone in some way, and it’s probably good for him. Keep doing it. If it’s going to make him play like this, I’m all for it."

After it was over, there was much attention paid to the Knicks' second-half comeback when the Celtics fell into their old bad habits that plagued them in the last six weeks of the regular season. Rivers called it a "microcosm" of their season, "where we're playing well and all of a sudden we go away from it for a while."

The details: "We went to too much iso and too much post where they could see us and trap us," Rivers said. "We just went back to what we were doing all Game 3, and that’s the multiple options and let Rondo read."

The other side of that is when the Knicks came out with all the energy and fire that was strangely missing in the opening moments of Game 3, it was Rondo who carried the Celtics safely to the other side. While Pierce started slowly, Rondo took control.

He breezed past the Knicks on the way to the basket, completely undeterred by their version of playoff defense. He found teammates in transition and knocked down wide-open jumpers. Rondo had nine points, five assists and zero turnovers in those first 12 minutes, and that allowed the Celtics to build an early advantage, which sustained them through the hectic fourth quarter.

"I always tell him when he plays with that type of energy, man, we’re almost unstoppable," Pierce said. "When he’s pushing the ball, setting the pace of the game, rebounding. We ask a lot. He has to carry a lot on his shoulders and we understand that, but we know he’s capable of doing it because he’s shown it."

All the angst over Rondo’s play down the stretch of the regular season seems to have subsided. Whether it was the injuries or the half-baked rationale that he missed Kendrick Perkins so much that he played laissez-faire basketball, the playoff version of Rondo has arrived with enough force to make everyone forget about the regular-season Rondo.

There’s an even simpler explanation for his late-season struggles. "It's impossible for 82 games to do that," Rondo said last week in a rare moment of candor.

The Knicks offered the perfect antidote to get Rondo and the Celtics back on track offensively. New York played over its head defensively in the first two games, but in this league you can only cover up your weaknesses for so long before they appear and often at the most inopportune moments.

Credit the Knicks with making a four-game sweep as competitive as they did without Chauncey Billups for most of it and with a clearly limited Amar’e Stoudemire. But credit only goes so far, and the Celtics did what the Heat could not do — finish off a series when it was there to be finished.

That earns them a week of rest before we get down to what promises to be a semifinal series of Armageddon-like intensity. Ever since opening night, when the Celtics reaffirmed their place over the upstart Heat, the whole season has been building up to this series. It's the new big three versus the old one. Pierce and LeBron James. Ray Allen and Dwyane Wade. Chris Bosh and Kevin Garnett. But it’s Rondo who is the one obvious advantage the Celtics have, and it’s the next series in which he really needs to go to work.

No doubt the Heat will give him different looks with either Wade or James guarding him. It will be a fantastic chess match with Rondo as the most important piece on the board. As great as the other three future Hall of Famers are, they don’t have the power to alter game plans and defensive strategies the way Rondo does.

How would he do on a team like Minnesota? The guess is that he would be a cult favorite and a sympathetic All-Star, but if the Celtics have taught us anything over the last four seasons it’s that great players can’t do it themselves. Rondo is fortunate in that regard, but with his talent, he doesn't need to apologize to anyone.

"You play with those guys, that’s probably what you’re going to get," Rivers said. "I don’t think he would trade it. I think he enjoys playing with them. If there is a negative side — I guess — that would be it. No matter how well you play, the question will be [there]. And someday that will be answered, too. I've got a feeling he’ll answer them all in the way he’s answering them now."

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